Arts

What subtle links bound the philosophical movement to nihilism (a vision of the world which asserts that "If God doesn't exist then everything is permitted" according to Dostoyevsky) in the world of cinema ? To try to answer this question we gathered around Françoise Bonardel, three philosophers keen on cinema: Pacôme Thiellement, Sam Azulys and Thibault Isabel.
First, they will try to define the polysemous word nihilism.

"From the idiot Christian talking to the birds, to the woodcock meaning the fool... the tale of mystic idiocy is written by pecking beaks on the water since the Agape is a river which carries meander the spirit of gift..." says Valérie Deshoulières.
Do you want to discover the iconographic transposition of Franciscan mystic in the works of  Giotto, the written works of G.K. Chesterton

A hundred years ago the surrealist movement was born. That time was influenced by political, economical, cultural and major ideological upheavals. At that time there were sparrings between men and women against the society of their time. At the top, there were the surrealists and their insurrectionary aim - in the inside and the outside - and spread all around the world. However since the death of André Breton en 1966 : what remains of surrealism ? What is its meaning in the current world?

Based on the painting "The Monk by the sea" by Caspar David Friedrich, Françoise Bonardel questions the common interpretation of this work which is supposed to express loneliness of man in a world which is not warranted by the faith. According to her, this lonely monk, standing on a beach between sky and sea, instead of embodying man loneliness in a world sealed by the death of God, would be the emblem of an aspiration towards a double infinite, aspiration of "romantic religiosity".

Like the song "Woman is the future of man" sung by Jean Ferrat with the lyrics by Aragon, woman is often associated to the "fertilizing origin" myth, like in the Pre-Columbian tradition with the Pachamama.
Alpha and Omega is an illustrated tale composed of twenty lithographs done with a soft lead pencil by the famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and which reinterprets in a very personal way the biblical genesis of the first man, Adam (Alpha) and the first woman, Eve (Omega).
Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and omega is the last one. The association of these two letters represents metaphysically "the principle and the creation", symbolically "the beginning and the end" (cf Book of the Revelation to John, "I am Alpha and Omega") and literally a complete table of reading "from A to Z".

What were the life, the works and the message of Djalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî (1207-1273)?
Rûmî's works includes more than one hundred and twenty thousand verses yet the poet used to say that "the words are prisons (...) they can't tell my experience". Artist affectation?  Certainly not, Rûmî's poetry is at an ontological level and tries to make indescribable perceptible:  Theophanic experience.
With her words and with her talent Leili Anvar will unveil this hymn to religion of love that was Rûmî's poetry, relate how he entered in poetry and how he entered in love, and describe "essences' fusion" that was his mystic ecstasy.

"The Spirit uses my hand"... "I'm not just following the orders" these are the statements of these medium painters, visionary or mystic that Michel Ternoy (psychologists and searcher within the frame of his works in psychiatric hospitals) worked. Going from Hildegarde de Bingen to Augustin Lesage, Michel Ternoy tries to show a coherence in grapho-pictorial forms of his own patients and of these artists that were gathered under the name Outsider art.  The questions, fascinating, are numerous.